The Board Game Thread

[Death From Above]

I've got my hands on the new D&D Ravnica expansion and it seems really good. None of that waste space in the book like that one that had 30 pages of name tables or anything like that. Lots of new official races, the guilds are varied to fit a variety of character types and a great example of how to add in that sort of feature in general, a nice block of treasures themed after Magic cards, some maps, and a bunch of new monster blocks. I haven't dug deep into the GM tools but they seem like solid additions. As far as adventure modules go it seems like a pretty fun world to play around in if you're looking for a super-city as your base. They seem to be doing well with this theme as Dragon Heist was a city-set module as well that is definitely pretty good.

I love the art. Not just the monsters and characters but the city district maps are really nice too. Probably not a surprise that on the Magic/D&D crossover finally happening that the art is a huge strong point. 

[Death From Above]

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/80190/CTSTStarter-Traveller?affiliate_id=31065

So, Traveller is a game nearly as old as basic Dungeons & Dragons that has gone through about a trillion revisions. It's pretty much the grandfather of space RPG. I've never actually played it myself, but it was a giant inspiration for Stars Without Number revised edition, which... might be my favourite tabletop RPG that I've ever tried?

Anyway, a 100% free starter version of Classic Traveller PDFs is now available, if that might be a thing you want to try out. There's no reason not to add this to your collection if you have interest in tabletop roleplaying.

[ctapley]

Anyone play Supershow, TV Pro Wrestling or any of the Filsinger games?  Any preference?  It seems as though Supershow is really only playable multi-player while the others are better as solo games?

There is also apparently a new card game named Book It! coming out this year... seems interesting.

 

[Tromatagon]

I used to play Champions of the Galaxy a lot and had fun with it, but yeah, it's best as a solo game.  YMMV depending on how much you like fantasy booking without really controlling the results of the matches - that's basically how it works.

 

[Pete]

On 10/12/2018 at 4:56 PM, jaedmc said:

D&D STORY TIME

So my 10 year old dropped into my wife's game. He plays a thief and asked my wife's party to help her clear his name in a murder mystery. It went final. And then....the FINAL BATTLE.

Towards the end of the fight, a Crystaline Devil is getting it's ass beat and it flips out...charges my sons character and drops him to 0 hit points. With his first attack. Sicne he has a second attack I make a roll to decide whether the monster would continue attacking my son's fallen character. He does, and now my son has two death save fails without even rolling a die.

My wife tries to stabilize him with two different characters before he has to make a death save and FAILS both rolls. He rolls his death save knowing if he rolls under a 10 his character is dead. He looked like he was going to be sick. But he made the save and stabilized. One of my wife's character managed to throw him some hit points with a healing word. 

On my son's next turn, he stands up...rolls a Natural 20 and lands the killing blow on the devil that nearly killed him. I asked him to describe how he destroys the monster, and he did. I said, "after you've killed the crystal devil, you turn back to your party, your clothes tattered and covered in your own blood and you say....what?"

And my son thinks for a second and says....

"I'm a man."

We died laughing. Not "THE" Man. He's now "A" man. Dungeons and Dragons is fun.

Freeze frame as he walks away...

[jaedmc]

On 12/18/2018 at 12:05 AM, Death From Above said:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/80190/CTSTStarter-Traveller?affiliate_id=31065

So, Traveller is a game nearly as old as basic Dungeons & Dragons that has gone through about a trillion revisions. It's pretty much the grandfather of space RPG. I've never actually played it myself, but it was a giant inspiration for Stars Without Number revised edition, which... might be my favourite tabletop RPG that I've ever tried?

Anyway, a 100% free starter version of Classic Traveller PDFs is now available, if that might be a thing you want to try out. There's no reason not to add this to your collection if you have interest in tabletop roleplaying.

Thanks for this. I actually bought an old Traveller book at a Half Priced Books a while back. Took a look inside and my eyes crossed. Then again, I think every RPG rule book does that to me. 

Speaking of old RPGs, I also found this James Bond RPG:

I'm not a Bond fan, but some of the mechanics were of interest. There's a notoriety mechanic that I might lift for D&D.

For Christmas, we got some cool games. I got my sone BATTLE LORE second edition, which is like the  old Battle Masters game(which I own). It's almost as simple, but has more rules to vary things up and it fits on a table, which is nice.

Santa got the kids ICE COOL and ICE COOL 2. I recommend this one if you've got kids. Or don't have kids. It's fucking fun for adults regardless. It's a flick game where you're flicking penguins around the board and collecting fish. Every round one player plays a Hall Monitor and their job is to just tag the other players and take their hall pass. If you only get one - get ICE COOL 2, as it has some variant rules with the point cards that make it a little more fun. You can buy both and they'll actually fit together into a giant super board, which allows you to play with 8 players and do some other rules variants like a race. My four year old actually won the last time we played. He hit some fucking ridiculous move(on accident because he's 4) and we all lost our shit. He said "I'm a boss at this game." So if you've got little ones, it doesn't matter because they can still do something amazing, even if they haven't some of the dexterity needed to be really good at it.

We're also on the back half of BETRAYAL LEGACY, and it's fucking great. The only drawback is the same as regular Betrayal At the House On the Hill, which is the rules can sometimes grind the game to a halt. It's totally clearer than the original game, but with each haunt it's like learning new game rules and it can be easy to forget all the shit you need to know to win. But even with that, it's so much fun, and we've had several HOLY SHIT moments. 

 

[odessasteps]

I had the Bond RPG, but when we played, we used Top Secret.

[odessasteps]

 

[Craig H]

So I think I MIGHT be ready to pull the trigger on buying Gloomhaven. Has anyone else here bought it or played it? Just curious to see what some of you think before I drop $120 to $140 on this.

[Raziel]

I want Betrayal Legacy so damn bad but have no one to play it with.

[John from Cincinnati]

On 1/10/2019 at 11:40 AM, Craig H said:

So I think I MIGHT be ready to pull the trigger on buying Gloomhaven. Has anyone else here bought it or played it? Just curious to see what some of you think before I drop $120 to $140 on this.

Make sure you lift the box with your knees, not your back. 

[Craig H]

7 minutes ago, West Newbury Bad Boy said:

Make sure you lift the box with your knees, not your back. 

Man that's a weird coincidence...I went on Amazon this morning and saw it for $107 and decided to take the plunge.

[turk128]

This is probably my favorite actual play show.  A great  mix of great DM, veteran players, newbies, improv nerds, and a fantastic set. The players don't actively try to derail the plot for the laughs because just by roleplaying, they are legit funny.

Dimension 20: Fantasy High

What if John Hughes ran a D&D campaign?

[Jiji]

I just played D&D for the first time a few weeks back and I'm starting to get sucked into it. I spent yesterday morning looking at options for buying tiles and miniatures (holy shit is that a time and money drain waiting to happen). I ended up just ordering a customized dude from Hero Forge, which is a really neat website, and my own dice. I may look to picking up a board game set or two but my friend does have an older/slower 3D printer (but he said it's not feasible to create whole story's worth of enemies sadly). If the minis in the board games were prepainted I'd probably be less reluctant, but they aren't. I don't have the patience, coordination, or time to really get into painting on a wide scale that would be necessary but the unpainted guys aren't too bad I guess. No big sets on eBay or Craigslist either, so it would seem like trying to get the most prepainted miniatures in the quickest amount of time would to be spend hundreds of dollars on those random booster packs. Eeeeeh, I think I'll pass on that for now. It would honestly be cheaper to buy a better 3D printer and use the free STL files for all 300+ character types than to go that route, even if they'd be unpainted.

My guy is a Tiefling warlock in a pact with Mephistopheles. Glass cannon type and I'm hoping to have some sort of set-up down the line where his power increases the closer he gets to death and/or have him lose HP each time he uses spells (like an old beat 'em up video game), but I'll work that out with the DM later. Only after the fact did I find out that warlock is one of the more difficult classes for neophytes to use but I'm okay with the challenge.

[Raziel]

Warlock as a newb? 

 

In all seriousness, good luck.  I didn't touch casters for at least a year after getting rolling.  Then again, I've always had an affinity for Rangers.

[Jiji]

Our DM is very generous and is using kid gloves for us because I'm new and the others hadn't played in over a year, so it was a pretty easy first quest. Holy shit, is the handbook cumbersome and I end up re-reading things like 3 or 4 times and still don't entirely get it. Good thing all the YT videos explaining concepts are like 30+ minutes, haha. It's awesome though and I don't mind the time commitment required  even though when I get home from work I'm usually just drained and likelier to gravitate towards more mindless stuff like Black Out than reading up on invocations and cantrips. 

[Craig H]

My God. Gloomhaven arrived today. Uh, this might be the biggest thing I've had to haul to a friend's house since doing Halo 1 lan parties. 

[Death From Above]

The thing with D&D books, and really the vast majority of roleplaying rulesets in general, is that they really don't make for good cover to cover reading at all. They are reference manuals, and although they are really functional it can definitely be intimidating when you first dive in. My advice is just to focus on shit that directly affects you alone until you have a handle on all that shit, and let the rest kind of absorb organically for now through play. Once you have a handle on stuff like basic combat rules ("what is my AC? I have a movement, an attack, do I have anything I can do as a bonus action?"), proficiency bonus, saving throws, skill checks, that shit will transfer to every character universally. So then you get to a point where it's just about understanding the unique shit each class can do.

Don't touch multiclassing, especially as a spellcaster, until you know what you're doing. I actually have a house rule about preventing excessive multiclassing because it unnecessarily complicates the game and lowers the amount of fun I have.

Warlocks do have a couple weird features that don't read that clearly when you're new, mainly the weirdness of how their spell slots work. They get less slots than every other casting class, but those spells are always firing at max power. Where as a wizard might end up with 4 l.1 spell slots, 2 l.2, and one l. 3, you'll end up with like 2 level 3 spell slots and that's it. So your lower level spells will be by default more powerful since you have to cast it as a third level spell (you'll see lots of spells that say something like "if you cast this using a higher level spell slot, add an extra d8 of damage per slot" or something), you just can't do it as much. But the flip side is your spell slots recharge on short rests, which no other class in the game can do (this is actually really easy to miss on a first read over). Plus Eldrich Blast is the strongest attack cantrip in the game.

I've never gone down the miniatures rabbit hole. I live within a THEATRE OF THE IMAGINATION. 

[Jiji]

Imagination is both healthy and fucking affordable, holy shit. Was talking with the DM and he suggested we could probably hit up some of those Reaper Bones sets or something in the future. The cheaper alternative is to use the paper minis. That's what I'm going to run with for now.

[jaedmc]

We do a mix of theatre of the mind and mini stuff. So sometimes it'll just be like "hey your camp is attacked what do you do?" and I just wing it and make sure to describe it in a way the players understand. The most important aspect is usually spacing. If the guy 35 feet away instead of 30, that's a big deal for melee fighters. So as long as I'm clear and don't muddle that up imagination works great.

But maybe once a session I'll bust out the grid paper or some of the terrain and the players always love it. I don't really do it for a whole dungeon map, it's usually just for an encounter or so. One time I did map out a fun sequence through some ruins that they liked. Sometimes having something visual allows the palyers to come up with cooler tactics in combat. Like "oh that's a table, can I run and slide under that table and stab that dude in the dick?" Roll for acrobatics.

The advice about just staying in your lane for your first character and learning that, and  basically ignoring the rest of the manual from @Death From Above is spot on. When I started learning how to play I was overwhelmed. then I realized that I just needed to learn some universal basics and then just my class shit. Same for DM'ing - I put the responsibility on the players to know what their shit is and how it works. If there's a question, it's not that hard to solve it after reading the text aloud. 

I kinda hate multiclassing. 

[Jiji]

I am glad I don't even know what multiclassing is. Is it the obvious of mixing and matching parts from one class with another? Just the thought hurts my head and soul. And the DM has been wonderful in allowing me just to focus on my own shit and even helped me through a lot of that. We even missed my patron to the fiend for our first night as there's just so much going on with the warlock class and everybody was rusty in general.

I signed up to Printable Heroes' patreon and it's fucking rad. It's still a WIP but super high quality prints with both front and back and he's building up the library nicely.

[tbarrie]

7 hours ago, Oyaji said:

I spent yesterday morning looking at options for buying tiles and miniatures (holy shit is that a time and money drain waiting to happen).

I recommend against tiles. I have a shitload, and they're neat, but I've never found a sensible way of sorting them. Makes finding the tile you want a giant pain.

3 hours ago, Death From Above said:

The thing with D&D books, and really the vast majority of roleplaying rulesets in general, is that they really don't make for good cover to cover reading at all.

Ars Magica third and fourth edition books made good reading. In the current edition they've made an effort to concentrate more on making them effective reference books for the game, which makes perfect sense, but makes them a less attractive option for those of us who don't actually have an Ars Magica group.

[Death From Above]

Multiclassing would be like if you got to level 6 as a Warlock then decided you wanted your next 3 levels to be in Rogue, or something. I think one multiclass is okay. It can be very effective, but you will also run into players that want to be a Halfling Bard/Warlock/Sorcerer/Rogue/Paladin and dude, just fucking no, I am not trying to figure out how that works.

[ctapley]

@Craig H you playing Gloomhaven yet?  Backed it on KS a few years ago.... incredible game.

 

@Oyaji there was ways to get cheaper miniatures for starters, especially via eBay... Mage Knight and WizKids lots are abundant and make a great intro to miniatures for campaigns (and are pre-painted)... also board games like Massive Darkness or other CMON properties often come with over a hundred unpainted minis.

[Craig H]

Not yet. I still need to read through the manual and get to know what I'm doing before I waste my friends time.